Centring the Periphery in Kinshasa

‘The field’ is an interesting concept. It only makes sense if we understand that there is also another place, which is ‘not-the-field’. But the common use of ‘the field’ suggests that it is shorthand for power relations as well as geography.

Written by Rachel Strohm

Dec 9, 2019

Palais de la Nation - Boulevard Triomphale. Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2013. ANTOINE MOENS DE HASE

Of all the minor mysteries one might encounter in life, the question of ‘what type of toilet do you have?’ does not typically number among them. It is generally quite visible, for a start, be it a flush toilet, a pit latrine or just a bush out back. And no one gets through the day without using it. So whence the confusion?

And yet. It was 2009, and I was looking through the results of a survey of middle-class residents of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), feeling confused about toilets. The survey was at the behest of an international microfinance bank, which wanted to know if their loans were making their clients better off. So, they hired me as a research consultant, and I hired a team of surveyors, and we spent our days visiting clients in their homes and shops across the city. We asked them if they had more money to spend on the essentials: school fees, adequate food, and home improvements such as metal roofs or improved toilets.

Thus the mystery. The bank’s clients were doing better than the average person but they were still just barely getting by. In interviews, they used the phrase that makes up the unofficial 15th article of the Congolese constitution: se débrouiller, meaning to take care of oneself somehow, with difficulty, and without hope of support from the state. They had metal roofs but not always enough food. They sent two children to school but not the third. They had water sometimes but electricity rarely. And, according to our data, a large number of them also had modern indoor toilets with expensive septic tank systems. It was all the more puzzling because I had used the toilet at many clients’ homes during the long days of surveying, and was often directed to a bucket, which was emptied into the open sewer in the street.

The error, as it turned out, lay in the French translation of ‘septic tank’, which is fosse septique. Fosse is a multivalent word which can mean ‘pit’ or ‘ditch’ as well as ‘tank.’ It turned out that the survey team wasn’t familiar with septic tanks, since most people in the city could not afford them. Consequently, they thought this was a question about any pit used to dispose of waste, like the open sewers. The error was ultimately my fault, for assuming that this type of technical term could be translated across country contexts as well as languages without additional explanation. Fortunately, it was easy enough to delete all of the mysterious ghost toilets from our data.

I called my manager in Washington, D.C. to let her know that we would be making this change. At the end of the conversation, she commented on how useful it was to have someone ‘in the field’ to catch the error. Someone (I translated to myself) out there at the periphery, generating new knowledge and sending it back to the centre of power.

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About the Author

Rachel Strohm

is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also co-founder and chair of the board at the Mawazo Institute, a non-profit research institute which supports the professional development of East African women in academia. She lives in Kampala, Uganda.

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Centring the Periphery in Kinshasa